Documentary photographer (and this issue's cover artist) Franco Salmoiraghi contributed an essay to accompany his photographs of Waialua town on O'ahu.

Here is a preview...

Thirty years ago, or even 10 years ago, you could imagine that Waialua would always be a sugar mill town. But in 1996 the mill was suddenly closed. It was the last one on O'ahu. Today, there are only a handful of sugar mills left on Maui and Kaua'i. Sugar in Hawai'i has been dying for years. It is perhaps as good as dead. Most of those immense landscapes of cane grasses are now fields of weeds or other smaller crops. The mills are rusting or dismantled. Only a few camps are left, mostly terminally run-down. The sugar towns no loger have a sugar-town future...

What about the people in the photographs? The lifestyle of a community is portrayed in momentary click of a shutter as these people share a few moments or a fraction of a second of their lives for the camera. They have given a gift of memory to the future, to those who wish to see and understand something of the life they and amd theif fellow workers led.